Cramer6 OSS Suite
Scalability Study
The IBM and Amdocs solution
delivers outstanding vertical
scalability to meet the needs
of service providers across all
Tiers — offering true carrier-
grade performance and
resilience, with exceptional
and predictable Total Cost
of Ownership.
This is a summary of the Cramer6
OSS Suite benchmark executed
in the 3rd quarter 2007 at the IBM
Telecommunications Infrastructure
Support Center in Montpellier,
France. It supported 1000 users
on the Cramer6 OSS Suite with
a representative set of Cramer
client components. The hardware
infrastructure included an IBM
System p5™ 595 server with two
logical partitions (application and
database tiers) and an IBM System
Storage™ DS8300.
“This benchmark — the first Cramer6
OSS Suite benchmark — is one more
proof point that IBM technology
can do more than just ‘get the work
done,’” says Stephen Leonard, Vice
President of Worldwide Sales for IBM
Power Systems. “IBM System p™
servers and Amdocs Cramer6 OSS
Suite can help telecommunications
companies manage growth and
complexity, minimize risk, foster
innovation and deliver business
results to increase return on IT
investments. Our joint customers are
applying this powerful IBM-Amdocs
combination to help drive down
energy and administrative costs
while driving up system utilization.
The result — far greater overall
infrastructure efficiency.”
Cramer6 OSS (Operational Support
Systems) Suite on IBM solution stack
Amdocs OSS Division is an
industry-leading provider of
end-to-end service automation
for telecommunications service
providers. OSS is key to
telecommunications service
providers, and the Amdocs and
IBM long term alliance is focused
on delivering innovative solutions
to the transformational challenges
facing service providers today. IBM’s
leading IBM System p servers, IBM
System Storage, and IBM e-business
infrastructure software, combined
with Amdocs OSS technology,
provide one of the most powerful
platforms to support the needs of
telecommunications organizations
both now and in the future.
Superior performance and value
of Cramer 6 OSS Suite on IBM
solution stack
IBM System p servers are designed
to be easy to install, manage and
virtualize – running IBM AIX® and
Linux® operating systems on the
legendary performance of IBM
POWER™ technology. These
powerful industry-leading servers
provide unprecedented value and are
ideal for mission-critical OSS/BSS,
transaction processing, and Web-
serving applications, in addition to
demanding scientific and technical
computing and business intelligence
tasks. Because IBM System p
servers are designed for delivering
enterprise solutions, they provide
the capacity and reliability that
companies need to drive successful
function with Cramer6 OSS Suite — at
a lower cost.
The IBM System Storage DS8000
series are high-performance, high-
capacity storage systems designed
to break through to an entirely new
dimension in scalability, resiliency
and overall total value. Incorporating
dual-clustered IBM POWER5™
servers, new four-port 4 Gbps Fibre
Channel/FICON host adapters, up
to 256 GB cache, fibre channel and
Fibre Channel ATA (FATA) disk drives,
the DS8000 series is designed for
outstanding performance.
IBM WebSphere Application Server
® TCO has been implemented while
V6 was used to deliver strong
performance in this benchmark,
and it also delivers a flexible, secure
infrastructure to providing a reliable
foundation for your service oriented
architecture. Designed for full Java™
2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE)
V1.4 compatibility and support for
Java 2 Platform Standard Edition
(J2SE) 5.0, WebSphere Application
Server V6 delivers a range of new
features that can help you:
• Improve time to value and make the
most of existing technology skills
with more simple, rapid development
and deployment.
• Be confident applications and
data are secure, and that you can
eliminate lost business opportunities
with a more scalable, secure, highly
available SOA runtime environment.
• Improve the flexibility of your
business and increase return
on investment with extensive
communication services.
• Minimize the cost of managing
your environment with effective
application management tools.
Cramer6 OSS Suite
Benchmark Overview
The objective of the Cramer6 OSS Suite
benchmark was to:
• Demonstrate that Cramer6 OSS Suite
performance meets or exceeds the
requirements of all Communication
Service providers including Tier 0.
• Confirm that the continued R&D
investment in product functionality,
architecture, and integration
maintaining and improving Cramer6
OSS Suite scalability.
• Validate this scalability on the IBM
System p hardware and WebSphere
Application Server platforms.
The results demonstrate that all of the
above benchmark objectives were not
only met, but exceeded — extending
the scale of the test beyond those of
previous benchmarks. The volume
of network data was significantly
increased to 1 billion objects (approxi-
mately 5.7 billion managed objects),
which is enough data to manage a
network of 76 million devices. Exceed-
ing all requirements to date for user
operations the benchmark went on
to simulate 1000 concurrent users. It
should be noted that these were 1000
busy, fully active (no “coffee-breaks”
or chatting built in to the simulation)
concurrent users performing the
entire range of service provisioning,
reporting and service assurance activi-
ties through the Cramer6 OSS Suite
Web-enabled GUI. Furthermore, the
combination of Amdocs Cramer6 OSS
Suite software and IBM System p serv-
ers showed no reason to doubt that
both could continue to scale to meet
even grander performance require-
ments if necessary.
Solution Overview
Cramer6 OSS Suite Products
at a Glance
Amdocs offers a unique value proposi-
tion to today’s carriers. As networks
and services continue to change at an
ever increasing rate, an OSS platform
is required that embraces that con-
tinual change. Through its acquisition
of the Cramer portfolio of Resource
Management products, and through
its innovative portfolio of Service Man-
agement products, Amdocs provides
unrivaled coverage of OSS.
Uniquely, what Amdocs can provide is
a single source of knowledge of all ser-
vices, resources, and customers who use
them—with built-in support for key oper-
ational processes of planning, fulfillment
and assurance—all referring to and
using this single source of knowledge.
Because this software can support mul-
tiple technologies for both physical and
logical inventory, and both network and
IT resources via a meta-data approach,
it forms the ideal basis to support the
foundation for a complete operational
support systems infrastructure.
The requirement to deploy and deliver IBM System Storage — offering utilization, respectively. The benchmark
new services quickly is also para- scalability, resiliency and overall was based on a typical Tier-0 opera-
mount. It is imperative that the OSS total value tors’ inventory with 5.7 billion managed
platform includes standard, out-of-the- • Low total cost of ownership objects, 76 million devices, 747 million

box configurations so that both time to
market and total cost of ownership can
be reduced and new services and new
technologies can be added quickly
and cost-effectively. To support this
goal, Amdocs has developed a library
of common inventory models and
processes, which are available as off-
the-shelf products known as “Packs.”
Business Benefits of the Amdocs/IBM
Joint Solution
You need to quickly respond to cus-
tomer and market demands, reduce
service provisioning cycle time and use
technology to drive productivity and
revenue. The IBM and Amdocs solution
for telecom bridges the gap between
IT and business resources, helping you
meet service-level objectives, enhance
ports, and an inventory greater than 1
Performance that meets your business TB of data.
needs
This benchmark was a milestone for
Amdocs and IBM Benchmark Test
Amdocs and IBM, showcasing the
Methodology
industry leading performance of the
The aim of the User Benchmark test
Cramer6 OSS Suite and IBM System
suite (UBM) is to establish the maximum
p servers for powering even the most
number of users that can successfully
demanding OSS operations. The results
be supported by a single deployment of
demonstrate that the needs of even
the Cramer6 OSS Suite, while still main-
the largest communication service
taining an acceptable user experience.
providers for service and resource
The methodology on which the User
management of both traditional and
Benchmark program is based is well
next-generation networks can be com-
established and has been in use since
fortably accommodated by Amdocs
Cramer 4. It takes into account the way
and IBM technology. Refer to Figure 1
in which real-world users make use of
and Figure 2 below, which show the abil-
the Cramer suite, and also considers
ity of the solution to scale and support
the typical user population mix for a
1000 concurrent users, with near linear
Tier 0 operator. The test suite therefore
scalability of response time and CPU
Figure 1: Average response times for Complex Cramer6 OSS Suite GUI operations against User Load

customer satisfaction and boost enter- 10

9
prise-wide productivity. 8
Response Times (s)

Web Report complex

7 View complex
6
Wizard complex
IBM e-business customers receive the 5
Linear (Web Report complex)
following benefits from a Cramer6 OSS 4
3 Linear (View complex)
Suite solution running on the IBM solu- 2
tion stack: 1
0
200 400 600 800 1000
• Global and dynamic high-
Simulated User Load
performance acquisition,
Figure 2: Average Performance of a Complex Web Report against CPU utilization for the Database Server
management and delivery of content and Application Server
Average Response Times (s)

• Virtually unlimited performance, 50 10

45 9
CPU % Utilization

reliability from IBM WebSphere, and 40 8

35 7
Amdocs OSS solution leadership 30 6
25 5
• Maximum performance and value 20 4
15 3
on IBM System p servers, extending 10 2
leadership over the competition 5 1
0 0
• High-performance, high-capacity 80 150 300 450 500 550 660 750 950 1000
User Load
DB CPU Utilization App Server CPU Utilization Web Report complex
simulates an appropriate distribution
of user interactions covering different
types of circuit designers, field engi-
neers and trouble ticket processors. An
actual test is performed by simulating
a specified user load (e.g. 500 or 1000
concurrent users) and then launching a
test probe that monitors the responsive-
ness of a representative set of Cramer6
OSS Suite GUI components (e.g. Techni-
cal Reports, Graphical Views, Wizards,
etc.). The results obtained are then com-
pared against predefined limits that are
used to indicate an acceptable level of
performance.
Test Architecture
The Enterprise Level Cramer6 OSS Suite
UBM was performed on IBM System
p and IBM System Storage hardware,
using the IBM WebSphere 6.0.2.9
Application Server and the Oracle 10g
database management system. The
Enterprise Level IBM hardware used for
the benchmarking test included:
Database server
- IBM System p5 595 with AIX 5.3
- 16 IBM POWER5+™ CPUs running at 2.3GHz
- 128 GB RAM
Application server
- IBM System p5 595 with AIX 5.3
- 4 POWER5+ CPUs running at 2.3GHz
- 32 GB RAM
Storage
- IBM System Storage DS8300
- RAID-10 array with 2 TB usable demands of service providers today,
Summary of Results
During the benchmark, the goal was
to prove that 500+ concurrent users
could be supported with acceptable
response times. This aim was exceeded
by scaling to 1000 users while maintain-
ing acceptable user experience. During
the performance test the number of
CPUs allocated to the application tier
was kept constant. From an examina-
tion of the CPU utilization of the two
server systems, it is evident that addi-
tional capacity was available to have
supported significantly higher user
populations, demonstrating the power-
ful scalability of the Amdocs and IBM
solution.
This benchmark demonstrated that the
Cramer6 OSS Suite on IBM System p
and IBM System Storage hardware is a
solution offering superior system capac-
ity with excellent response time. Results
were acceptable up to twice the target
user load and delivered significant per-
formance improvement compared to
previous benchmarks, with near linear
scalability to 1000 concurrent users.
Dale Thomas, General Manager,
Amdocs OSS Division concluded.
“Service providers need to be comfort-
able that solutions they deploy can flex
and support their ever changing busi-
ness and market requirements. This
benchmark proves the superior abili-
ties of Amdocs Cramer6 OSS Suite and
IBM System p hardware to scale and
perform – cost-effectively – against the
but also into the performance needs of
the Global Tier 0 providers of tomorrow.”
For complete results, please contact
Didier Petitprez (didier.petitprez@fr.ibm.
com) or Uri Sela (uri.sela@amdocs.com).
The information in this Guide is intended to provide
guidance for those implementing an IBM and
Amdocs Cramer6 OSS Suite solution. It discusses
findings based on a solution that was created and
tested under laboratory conditions. These findings
may not be realized in all customer environments,
and implementation in such environments may
require additional steps, configurations, and
performance analysis. The information herein is
provided “AS IS” with no warranties, express or
implied. This information does not constitute a
specification or form part of the warranty for any
IBM or Amdocs Cramer products. Implementation
and certification of the solution rests on the imple-
mentation team. The users of this guide should
always check the latest release information in the
product Readme file(s) and check the product
Web pages for the latest updates and findings.
IBM makes no representation or warranty regard-
ing third-party products or services.
IBM and Amdocs are separate legal entities. Noth-
ing herein shall create any legal partnership, joint
venture or other legal relationship except as may
be expressly stated herein.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2007
IBM, the IBM logo, AIX, POWER, POWER5,
POWER5+, System p, System p5, System Storage
and WebSphere are trademarks of IBM Corpora-
tion in the United States, other countries, or both.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds
in the United States, other countries of both. Java
and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks
of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States,
other countries, or both. Other company, product
and service names may be trademarks of service
marks of others.
PSW03036-USEN-00